The web collects all of this, serving as a single access point to society’s present thoughts and past knowledge. We can transform Wikipedia’s crowdsourced history of the world from a pile of text into an animation of global societal change over two centuries. In short, we have both the data and the computational tools today to visualize and understand human history in ways we could never before imagine. At the same time, these visualizations also shed light on fascinating patterns in how we as humans see our history. What if machines could pour over human history entirely on their own, looking for all of the connections that bridge our past to our present?

Source: Forbes January 11, 2019 02:37 UTC